On Mon, 5 May 2008, Kris Kennaway wrote:
Carl Shapiro wrote:
FreeBSD Hackers,
I have a general question about the compatibility of FreeBSD binaries
within major releases. If I build a binary for a given release of
FreeBSD can I make a reasonable guarantee that the binary will run on
both previous and subsequent minor releases of the same major release?
In other words, if I build on FreeBSD 6.3 and do not rely on anything
unique to 6.3 (such as the presence of specific version strings) how
certain can I be that the code will or will not run on 6.2, 6.1 etc.?
Also, is this documented anywhere on the FreeBSD web site? The
closest thing I could find is the following guidance for driver
vendors which falls just short of answering my question:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/VendorInformation
(Too bad the fancy illustration is missing.)
Binaries compiled on a certain version of FreeBSD will continue to run on
later versions, but are not guaranteed to run on earlier versions (and in
fact *will* not run depending on the binary). This is because over time the
system libraries and kernel grow new features which may be used by
applications, so they will therefore fail to run if executed on old systems
that do not provide these features.
For 7.0 and onwards, we will hopefully have a tool that you can
run on your application to do abi checking. One of the things
it should be able to do is tell under what releases it will run,
including previous releases.
For 6.x, you may be able to manually check the symbols your
application uses against the libraries from 6.0, 6.1, etc.
This should give a good idea as to whether your application
will run on those releases. I think checking symbols is
good enough for releases within a branch since we don't
change ABIs.
--
DE
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